Noble Art Deco Treasures from Spain

Palacio de Liria, the 18th-century Madrid residence of Spain’s dukes of Alba; the 17th duke and his wife, María del Rosario, known as Totó, lived there in the early 1900s.

Most brides get practical wedding gifts: a shining toaster, plush towels, wine glasses. Then there’s the Spanish aristocrat Totó Alba, whose groom, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart, the 17th Duke of Alba de Tormes, gave her a present that combined practicality with individuality and splendor—a three-room suite in the couple’s 18th-century residence, Palacio de Liria, in Madrid, decorated by Armand Albert Rateau (1882–1938), one of the most exclusive interior designers of the 1920s.

A 1920s image of the richly appointed bath, part of the three-room suite conceived by Armand Albert Rateau and commissioned by the duke as a wedding gift for his bride.

No one knows exactly why the newly wed duke sought out the tubby, bespectacled French designer, whose signature creation was a circa-1919 bronze armchair with a slinglike seat composed of chains bearing fish-shaped links. Records related to the Alba project were destroyed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, when a bomb devastated the neoclassical palace. Scholars had long believed that Rateau’s work there had gone up in flames too. But on Thursday, May 23, seven objects he produced for the duchess’s suite will be auctioned at Christie’s in Paris.

Two patinated-bronze floor lamps, from a set of four that originally furnished the bath, 1921. Estimate: $1.9 million–$2.7 million.

The items are all from the bath, and include two bronze floor lamps (of a set of four originally made) featuring sculpted birds clutching snakes in their beaks, and a bronze-and-marble cocktail table whose top is balanced on the backs of crouching pheasants (the three pieces are estimated to bring as much as $2.7 million each); a swan-arm love seat ($270,000–$400,000); a bronze-and-marble dressing table with peacock supports symbolizing vanity and legs shaped like ancient Roman hairpins ($810,00–$1.1 million); a gilt-wood chaise longue ($540,000–$800,000); and the sunken Carrara-marble tub ($210,000–$270,000).

According to a statement from the duchess's descendants, who are the consignors, the sale of the Rateau works will “support the funding of [the House of Alba’s] heritage and of its various palaces throughout Spain as well as supporting new projects for the family.” The statement also notes that the relics are not historic, have nothing much to do with Spain, and, therefore, are expendable.

This early-1930s portrait of the duchess by Ignacio Zuloaga now hangs in the Palacio de Liria; the image was once featured on a Spanish postage stamp.

Doña María del Rosario de Silva Gurtubay y Fernández de Córdoba y González de Castejón, Marchioness of San Vicente del Barco—a.k.a. Rosario or, more simply, Totó—was a prime marital catch. The only child of a Spanish duke (as a girl she was known as Totó Aliaga, after her father’s title), she was also an heiress to a Bilbao fortune built on codfish, thanks to an enterprising great-grandfather. The man who asked for her hand was Don Jacopo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó Portocarrero y Osorio, the 17th Duke of Alba de Tormes, a globe-trotting grandee so perfectly tailored that a newspaper dubbed him “Our Elegant Tourist.” One of the richest men in Spain and a direct descendant of England’s James II, the duke, known as Jimmy, was past 40 and still unattached. (Romances with an American debutante, a married English duchess, and the future Mrs. Cole Porter had gone nowhere.) Their courtship led to a quiet wedding on October 7, 1920, at the Spanish Embassy in London. As one photograph attests, the 20-year-old bride wore a tea-length lace dress and cradled a sheaf of Easter lilies in her gloved hands. The groom, who had won a silver medal in polo at the Summer Olympics in Antwerp three months earlier, stood at her side, dressed in a military uniform, his chest glittering with decorations and his lean face reflecting, well, resignation.

The duke and duchess on their wedding day, in 1920.

Twelve months later, the duke approved Rateau’s proposal for Totó’s suite by emphatically signing “Alba” on the plan; the entire three-room scheme was complete by 1925, when the designer exhibited a near-replica of the bath at the Paris gallery Arnold Seligmann et Cie. The following year, as part of a survey of French contemporary design, the dressing table shown at Seligmann traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was added to the permanent collection.

No images of the duchess’s bedroom or boudoir seem to have survived, but two contemporary views of the bath exist, snapped by Madrid photographer M. Moreno. They illustrate a high-ceilinged ovoid room, anchored by a central sunken tub of white Carrara marble that was set into a black-and-white stone floor trimmed with gold mosaic tiles. Wrapping the space was a 360-degree mural of gold leaf and dark-brown lacquer. The hand-painted scenes depict a somewhat Seussical forest of feathery trees and fantasy flowers, interspersed with fauna both wild (rabbits and wolves among them) and domestic (a woeful dachshund and a cranky Pekingese, likely representations of the Albas’ own dogs).

The white Carrara-marble tub, 1921. Estimate: $210,000–$270,000.

Cut into the Alba murals were curved jib doors concealing the toilet, the sink, a closet, and a narrow corridor, while a pair of pocket doors centered in one wall slid open to reveal the duchess’s boudoir. Niches expanded the room’s footprint enough for it to be a space for relaxing as well as bathing. (Though period images show the room’s furnishings moved into different locations by the photographer, the general placement seems clear.) In the niche opposite the pocket doors stood the chaise longue and low tabouret, the latter piece being the perfect perch for a manicurist to attend to the reclining duchess's nails. Another niche encompassed a setback for the swan sofa and opposite that, on the other side of the tube, was a deep, dramatic alcove with windows—where the real world intersected with Rateau’s artificial realm. It was there that the dressing table likely stood, overlooking sky and treetops and bathed in enough natural light for applying makeup.

The bronze and gilt-wood sofa, 1921. Estimate: $270,000–$400,000.

The duchess’s furniture and complementary hardware and fittings had an archaic air, as if fashioned a millennium ago—a not unlikely daydream, given that Rateau spent part of 1914 touring Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the archaeological museum in Naples. The ancient bronze furnishings he saw on that trip led him to make a startling departure from the modes he created earlier in his career, back when, as The New York Times noted in 1926, he was “a reproducer of fine old models of French furniture for particular persons of traditional tastes but insufficiently supplied with heirlooms.” That being said, when the designer's whimsical works made their way to the Metropolitan of Museum of Art in the 1920s, the newspaper’s critic H. I. Brock, unimpressed by the zoological profusion, sniffed that Rateau “lets himself get carried away by a childish fancy.”

As for the auction being held next week, caveats are few but worth noting. The sofa, for instance, remains a rarity, but Christie’s research now considers it one of two known examples rather than a unique design. Restored for the purposes of the sale, the sofa in its present condition lacks some of the details shown in the 1920s photographs; perhaps it was damaged during the bombing. Its bronze frieze has lost the decorative panels and central rosette, and the catalogue makes clear that the feet are replacements (and, from the looks of things, not absolutely identical). Ornamenting either end of the frieze are rosettes that also seem to be new and slightly disproportionate. The dressing table, meanwhile, is missing its adjustable round mirror, as evidenced by the holes in the marble top where the mirror was once secured, and the Labrador-blue granite top appears to be a later addition, since it no longer has the softly rounded edge shown in a Moreno photograph and is tonally at odds with the verdigris bronze base.

A few items made for the duchess’s bath are still unaccounted for, such as an ocelot-fur-clad tabouret, the dressing table’s chair, an alabaster lamp made to look like a vase, and a black-and-white fur rug. Two of the original quartet of floor lamps has vanished, too, as has the tub’s phoenix-shape fittings. Says Sonja Ganne, Christie’s European head of 20th-century decorative arts and design, “We unfortunately don’t know much about what happened precisely at the time” of the bombing of Palacio de Liria, which had been emptied of its most important treasures and requisitioned by the Communist Party. The gutting of the building occurred during an air raid by German and Italian pilots attempting to bring Madrid under the control of Spain’s rebel head of state, Generalissimo Francisco Franco—ironically, since at that time Jimmy Alba was one of his most prominent supporters. (Restoration of the palace began in 1948 and was completed in 1956, with architect Manuel Cabanyes Mata following plans produced by the duke’s late friend Sir Edwin Lutyens.) “There are some photographs showing furniture—not the Rateau pieces—standing outside the palace following its destruction,” Ganne says. “So the family must have stored the [Rateau] furniture in a safe place.”

A circa-1930 portrait of Totó Alba, with her only child, Cayetana, who is the present titleholder. Photo reproduced with the gracious permission of the Duchess of Alba.

At the time of the palace's destruction, however, the duke's young wife had already been dead for two years. As recounted in Yo, Cayetana (Espasa Calpe), the memoir of the couple's only child, Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, the current Duchess of Alba, Totó Alba succumbed to tuberculosis on January 11, 1934, at the age of 33. Though her final years were spent in and out of Swiss sanatoriums, she breathed her last at Palacio de Liria, one hopes within the fantastical suite that Rateau had conceived for her.